May 26th, 2016:

With the official news this week that Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct pipeline project is dead, opponents are now challenging the State of New Hampshire’s proposal to allow electric companies to charge customers for construction of a different natural gas pipeline, according a recent Keene Sentinel article.

That would not only be an unfair burden on customers, opponents say, but it’s also against New Hampshire law, and would harm the region’s efforts to explore energy-efficient and renewable-energy options, according to the report.

Eversource Energy has petitioned the N.H. Public Utilities Commission asking the agency to approve a contract for it to buy natural gas off Spectra Energy’s Access Northeast pipeline, which would deliver fracked natural gas from the shale fields of northeastern Pennsylvania through existing connections and new interconnections to pipelines in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The N.H. commission has to decide whether Eversource is allowed to enter the 20-year contract with Spectra for gas transportation and storage services — and recoup some of the money it spends on the project from its customers, according to the Sentinel.

“Fundamentally, making electric ratepayers fund gas infrastructure locks the region into further over-reliance on natural gas, which has inherent price instability,” Kathryn R. Eiseman, president of the organization, told the Sentinel. The massive building out of natural gas infrastructure, potentially at the ratepayers’ expense, doesn’t help the New England region as it seeks to shift more toward “environmentally sound energy sources,” she said.

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